This is Child Protection?

This is Child Protection?
By Gregory A. Hession, J.D.
Published: 2007-07-23 05:00 Family | Email this page | printer friendly
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Imagine your terror and panic: you are awakened by an armed SWAT team in
the middle of the night, demanding to be let into your home to take your
children away. The grim-faced agents show you no warrant, no court
order, and no mercy. They give you no reason for their presence, other
than having received an unspecified report about child abuse. They bark
commands and menace you and your children with their weapons. The
children are taken out of your home screaming, shoved into cars, and
whisked away into the night.

This is not a Soviet-era movie script, but a reality in thousands of
homes in the United States every year, courtesy of state child
protective services agencies.

The least reported and understood social crisis of our time is the vast
new police state run by these state social services agencies, which are
generically referred to as “child protective services,” or CPS. The
states have different names for them, such as Department of Social
Services or Department of Children and Families, but they are all
operating under a federal mandate. Whatever they are called, our next
generation of children may never recover from their predatory intrusions
into families.

Some may dismiss these concerns as hyperbole, but the numbers are
appalling. In 2005 alone, over 3.3 million reports involving six million
children were made to state child-abuse hot lines, the vast majority of
which eventually proved to be untrue. Over 500,000 children currently
are in foster care. Another 300,000 or so are forcibly removed from
their homes by the system every year. Tens of billions of dollars are
expended every year on the care of these children, and on the juvenile
court systems which enable it, along with costs of therapy, drugs,
lawyers, and related services.

This system is relatively new. In response to professional agitation to
“do something” about the problem of child abuse, Congress set forth
standards for state child protection agencies in 1974, in the Child
Abuse Protection and Treatment Act, also called the Mondale Act for its
senatorial sponsor. If a state conformed their system to the federal
mandate, it could get generous reimbursement from the feds. The states
immediately complied, and modern child protection was born.

The system does not work, and never has. Thirty years, hundreds of
billions of dollars, and millions of ruined families later, the problem
of abuse is little improved.

Not one state has ever come close to meeting the bare minimum standards
set out in federal law for CPS agencies. Of seven federal criteria that
apply, only a few states have even met one, and no state even complies
with a few of them.

In almost all cases, children are traumatized by their experiences in
state custody. A large number of the children taken into captivity never
return — many are adopted out to other families, killed, injured, or
caused permanent psychological harm. Parents are rarely helped, even
when they need some improvement.

Can this happen in America? It can, and it does. What follows is a brief
tour through the seamy underbelly of the CPS system. That these agencies
engage in such despicable behavior is often not believed by anyone who
has not been directly affected by it. CPS structures and systems
resemble those used by totalitarian regimes.
The Snitch Network

The entry point of most children into the child protection system is
through a government-mandated “snitch network” consisting of 50-odd
professions that are required by law to report any suspected child abuse
or neglect to a state “hot line.” Teachers, police, therapists, doctors,
nurses, even clergy, must report to CPS, under threat of prosecution. In
addition, CPS propaganda has convinced many neighbors and friends and
personal enemies to make such reports.

Once a report is made, the CPS agency has to decide whether it is
credible, and if so, what to do about it. Of about 3.3 million calls to
state hot lines in 2005, about 40 percent were screened out before going
any further. For the remaining calls, the agency had to decide whether
it was an emergency, or could be administratively investigated in due
course.

Why are so many reports of child abuse being generated? A large
contributing factor is that the legal definitions of abuse and neglect
are so elastic as to encompass virtually any parental behavior, from
spanking their children to letting them eat too much “fast food.” Also,
supply sometimes creates its own demand, since an army of professionals
has arisen to service the industry, and must be kept well fed.

In response to child-abuse emergencies, real or imagined, the agency
usually sends CPS agents and police to a home. The police pry the
children’s little fingers off their mother, with everyone screaming
hysterically during the “pull,” as they call it.

In other cases, children are snatched from school or from buses after
school, without notice to parents frantically waiting at bus stops.
Often they are taken late on a Friday afternoon, so parents cannot
challenge the action in court over the weekend, and so that the children
can be held incommunicado and given medications — drugged — during that
time. The goal is to soften the kids up to make “disclosures” about
parental abuse in order to allow CPS to get a court order for custody.
Sometimes CPS agents go to court to get an order before taking the
children, but when they do so, it is almost always done in secret in a
closed courtroom, without the parents or attorneys present.

Unfortunately, CPS often gets it wrong both ways — genuine abuse is
often missed or ignored, while most of what is reported as abuse or
neglect does not rise to any reasonable level of seriousness. (See chart
below.)
Into the Belly of the Beast

After the snitch network does its part to get the children into the CPS
pipeline, the cases either go into an elaborate administrative process,
or to a so-called “shelter” court hearing, held within a few days in
order to determine whether the removal of the children from the home was
proper. At that court hearing, usually conducted in secret without the
press or public allowed, the court will appoint separate lawyers for the
mother, the father, and the children. Many of these hearings are
conducted so quickly that parents do not have time to prepare a defense,
and the lawyers often cut corners by telling their clients to just agree
to keep the children in custody until a trial, which could be a year or
more away. Only later do the parents find out that they had agreed that
their children needed state protection and had waived any possibility of
getting them back quickly, or even at all.

The cases that do not go to court are shunted into a surreal,
nightmarish administrative system, and the children are often allowed to
stay at home or with relatives while the bureaucrats dither.

A social worker will eventually make up a document called a “case plan”
or “service plan,” in which the alleged failings of the parents are
summarized. The case plan includes a set of tasks and social services
intended to “fix” the parent, much like one might repair an appliance.
In order to get the children back home if they were taken, or to
foreshorten an administrative case, the parents must do all the
activities mandated on the plan, such as going to parenting classes,
meeting with a social worker, going to substance-abuse treatment, or
getting psychological evaluations.

Social workers, often severely maladjusted and working out their own
tortured past vicariously through their clients, frequently treat the
parents with whom they work as property, ordering them around at whim.
They set up services to be done during work hours, causing people to
lose jobs and placing the family in financial distress. They can order
that a man suspected of spanking his children must leave the home,
putting additional emotional and financial burdens on a family.

As with most government programs, there are unintended consequences that
no one considered when putting the scheme together. Since social workers
are so easily duped, divorcing spouses have made extensive use of CPS
reports as a weapon in family court. Want to get custody fast? Just call
CPS and accuse the other spouse of abuse. CPS will also do the bidding
of schools that have trouble handling difficult children, and will
threaten parents who do not want to drug their children with ADHD chemicals.

When children are placed in foster care, the agency usually treats them
with mercenary callousness. Social workers and foster parents do things
to children that if done by parents would likely have triggered removal
of the child. Children are routinely kept out of school for weeks, are
denied needed medical care, and are even abused physically and sexually.
Children with asthma are often placed with heavy smokers, and children
with speech impediments are often placed with immigrants who struggle
with English. Almost all children are heavily drugged, with up to six
powerful mind-bending medications, in order to ensure their docility.

Even in little ways, the system continually shows contempt for its
captives. Social workers leave a home without putting the children in
car seats, cancel visits with the parents if they have better things to
do, or place the children in homes far from the parents in order to make
it harder to have visits. The grinding banality of socialist-spawned
child care is soulless, loveless, and arbitrary.

Abuse committed against a child while in foster care is supposed to be
investigated by a special outside unit, similar to an internal-affairs
division in a police department. However, mindful of potential lawsuits
if abuse were discovered, the investigators usually don’t find any.
Statistics reported to the government about abuse in foster care are low
because the agency gets to do its own investigations. In my experience
representing parents, most of whose children have been actually abused
in foster care, the CPS usually sweeps the allegations under the rug and
fails to stop the abuse.
Outcomes of Child-abuse Investigations
Though states' "child protective services" intervene readily in family
situations, using as a guideline for intervention whether a child "is at
risk of maltreatment," even after 40 percent of allegations of child
abuse are initially screened out, a further 66 percent of the remaining
allegations of child abuse are found to be unsubstantiated. (This number
includes the cases labeled on the chart as "Alternative Response
Nonvictim," where no investigation of the reported child abuse was
undertaken, yet it was determined that there was no abuse.)
Your Day in Court

Juvenile or family court is where the fate of millions of children is
decided. Not many years ago, these courts were a sleepy sinecure for a
few political hacks. Now, with the child-abuse industrial complex in
overdrive feeding them, juvenile courts have come into vogue. Crowds of
sad-faced parents shuffle around the court’s waiting areas, lining the
halls. Lawyers, forgetting the indescribable pain that their clients are
enduring, openly laugh and gossip with CPS attorneys and therapists.

At court hearings, the parents usually cannot speak, and the children’s
wishes are almost never heard or considered. Hearings often last only a
few minutes, or even seconds. The traditional rules of evidence and
notions of due process are rarely observed in these special courts,
which are neither criminal nor civil. Hearsay on top of hearsay,
sometimes three or four layers deep, is often admitted into evidence,
which would never be allowed in any traditional court.

The burden of proof for taking children away from parents on a temporary
basis is merely to show by a “preponderance of evidence” that the child
was abused, which is a weak and ill-defined standard. By contrast, the
state has to prove guilt in a speeding ticket case beyond a reasonable
doubt. A final termination of parental rights requires that the state
prove unfitness by “clear and convincing evidence,” still well short of
the quantum of proof required to prove jaywalking.

Most juvenile cases end with a judgment against the parents, allowing
CPS to keep the children until they are 18, or to farm them out for
adoption. The home team — that is, the CPS prosecutor and social workers
— are in front of the judge every day. The process becomes a
choreographed dance, like a Mozart-era minuet, with all the players
moving in lockstep and the outcome often determined before the first
witness is called.

By looking at the numbers, one would conclude that there is an epidemic
of child abuse in America. However, the evidence shows that there is
actually an epidemic of hysteria about child abuse, because most of the
official complaints are either false or greatly exaggerated. It is a
squalid business. Big “non-profit” companies have arisen to service the
insatiable demand for warehousing children and providing therapy,
education, and other services. Special needs children can sometimes
fetch thousands of dollars per week for these sub-contractors from the
state and the feds, which make millionaires out of the subcontractors
owners and officers.

Tens of thousands of parents have their parental rights terminated every
year, and their children taken for adoption to other persons or
families. In 2005 alone, 67,000 children were removed for adoption.
Another 110,000 were waiting for adoptive homes. Each of these children
has been through a painful removal from parents, a lengthy court
process, numerous foster homes, large amounts of drugs and therapy, and
sometimes years of waiting.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed by Congress in 1997, sets out
adoption quotas for the states, with money bonuses for exceeding them,
and even larger bonuses for processing a larger number of “special
needs” children. Thus, adoption becomes the goal for many children who
should not be taken from families in the first place. For CPS, it
becomes just a commercial sales transaction: meet the quota, collect the
cash.

Some parents do abuse children, and states have comprehensive criminal
laws to deal with those cases. Most persons would likely disagree with
CPS in how it defines abuse or neglect. Families are attacked for
home-schooling or spanking their children, for not overseeing all play
activities, or for when a child has an accident. Sometimes a child’s
illness, poverty, or parents who are going through a time of conflict
will trigger CPS involvement. There is also a palpable animus against
families who are religious, or who do not like state interference. Only
a very small percentage of the 3.3 million reported cases annually prove
to be genuine abuse, and the system does a bad job of sorting them out.

There are reasons why the system does a bad job. Colleges churn out
hordes of 23-year-old social-work graduates, childless and clueless, who
are sent into homes to make life-changing decisions. Their formal
education is grounded in doctrinaire Marxism and feminism, and they
believe in their viscera that the state should communally raise children.

Another disincentive to changing the system is the fact that social
workers are given legal immunity for almost any discretionary decision
no matter what harm results to the children. Social workers exercise
virtually unlimited power over families, with little accountability to
anyone for overreaching or even for egregious offenses.

Federal reimbursement is the locomotive that drives the child-protection
business. Regardless of what families actually need, CPS determines
where to place its resources based on what returns the most
reimbursement. The vast percentage of federal reimbursement (90 percent)
comes from taking children into custody, while only a tiny fraction (10
percent) is available to help intact families. In other words, taking
children pays, helping families costs.

The game of cadging federal CPS dollars has become so intense that
states often hire multi-million dollar consultants to assist them in
maximizing federal reimbursement for the children they take. For
instance, Massachusetts hired the now-defunct Arthur Anderson
Consulting, at an estimated fee of about $8.6 million, to structure the
state program to take advantage of as many federal reimbursement
categories as possible.
What Can Be Done?

Is the system really as corrupt, incompetent, destructive, and
ineffective as this article portrays it? No, it’s actually far worse —
if you ask a parent whose children have been victimized by it! The
public perception is that CPS is doing a tough job, and standing against
child abuse. However, any family caught in its web would testify to a
completely different reality. When I take on a new case and forewarn a
family about CPS dirty tricks, they usually think I am exaggerating.
Surely it can’t be that bad. However, after the first court hearing, or
if their children are removed, those families uniformly confirm that I
didn’t tell them the half of it.

What should be done to address the problem of child abuse and the
problem of abuse by the system of parents and children? It won’t be easy
because CPS policies and actions are based on a deeply flawed world
view. Moreover, the agencies are run by inept and agenda-driven managers
and social workers, and are enabled by a dysfunctional legal system.

Real reform would cut at the very heart of the premise of child
protection — that the state is a better parent, a legal doctrine called
parens patriae in Latin. Some fixes are obvious — end federal standards
for and funding of state child protection agencies, set objective
standards for child abuse, require traditional due process in juvenile
courts that are open to the public, and eliminate immunity for
social-worker malfeasance.

Millions of children are imperiled by this imperious, abusive CPS
system, which works quietly without much public scrutiny. Change will
likely come only when its cruelties have been exposed, and the public
reaffirms that raising children is the responsibility of families, not
the state.